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Oct. 21, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:12
Dave Chapelle Is Funny. Get Over It. | Ep. 1359
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Netflix employees walk out to protest Dave Chappelle's special and the media gush over them.
Plus, the Biden administration says they've got vaccines for five-year-olds, but the kids will still have to mask.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Okay, so.
Yesterday, protesters showed up at Netflix, and it wasn't like a massive crowd of protesters.
It was like, you know, a few dozen people, and they showed up outside Netflix, and this was a national news story.
Now, you should ask yourself two questions.
One, why are people protesting outside of Netflix?
And two, why should anyone care?
Because protests happen all over the United States for a variety of reasons, and yet they do not receive international let alone national media attention. They just don't receive any of that sort of attention. So the real question is, why is it that the media are obsessed with covering like a few dozen people who are pissed off at Netflix, as opposed to all of the other issues in the world? And the answer is because deep down in their hearts, members of the media are these protesters. And by covering this sort of stuff, they get to feel virtuous. According to the Wall Street Journal,
a group of protesters gathered outside one of Netflix's LA office.
offices Wednesday to express anger over streaming giant Dave Chappelle's comedy special as some employees released demands for management and staged a walkout.
First of all, your demands will not be met, and you can enjoy unemployment anytime you see fit.
In the special, The Closer, Chappelle made jokes and remarks regarding gender.
Many in the transgender community, including some Netflix staffers, found offensive.
The company has defended the special, citing reasons, including the company's commitment to artistic freedom.
We have some video of the protesters and they were not acting well.
There's some counter protesters.
One of them was carrying a sign that said, we like Dave.
And this prompted one of the very sensitive and deeply emotionally in touch protesters to immediately tear down that sign and take it apart.
We like Dave.
Unacceptable!
You don't like Dave!
No!
He starts tearing apart the sign.
Now imagine if somebody had been holding a pro-trans sign and somebody came along and started tearing that up.
National history!
Transphobia!
Wow, taking down that sign.
Like a boss.
Like a boss.
What a hero.
What a hero that human was.
Okay, and then they had scuffles and shouting at the Netflix protest.
I love these people who also get up in your face like this.
There's a guy, he's literally just standing there holding his sign.
And then the lady who comes up at the end, I assume she's a lady, I don't mean to misgender anybody, who comes up at the end, like stands right in front of him, like she's boxing him out from a rebound.
First of all, if this guy goes for a rebound over this person, that is not a contest.
That's Charles Barkley going up against Muggsy Bogues.
But in any case, that was not all of the video from this.
Again, this is not a major protest, guys.
This is like a few dozen people.
It got massive front page national attention.
Here's some more of the video from the protest.
This guy has a science.
I think the same guy has a science.
Jokes are funny.
And now they're chanting Trans Lives Matter.
So it's hilarious.
Another guy says, Dave is funny.
And they're chanting Trans Lives Matter.
So there's nothing quite as funny as watching some members of the Intersectional Coalition adopt the rubric of other members of the Intersectional Coalition.
Isn't that cultural appropriation?
I thought it was Black Lives Matter.
So now trans are going Trans Lives Matter against a black man.
So that's really, really entertaining.
According to the Wall Street Journal, some Netflix employees attended the event but didn't speak.
Supporters of the comedian also showed up and tried to disrupt the proceedings.
The event was organized by Ashley Preston, a trans activist.
If your satire is punching down, you're being a bully, Ashley Preston said.
I'm tired of companies like Netflix making money off of trauma to my community.
Okay, so let's just point out one thing here.
It is not punching down to call out a massive, now mainstream media movement to force Americans to use non-biological pronouns.
That is not punching down.
That is a major issue of public contention in today's day and age.
And you know this because you literally have institutions in American life who are pushing this, like from the top levels of power.
I mean, for goodness sake, you had the State Department pushing this yesterday.
The State Department celebrated International Pronouns Day yesterday.
And they put out like an actual tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day.
Quote, today on International Pronouns Day, we share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.
Read more here on Share America.
And they have a little graphic of a woman says she her and then a man says he him and then a woman that says they them and then a woman that says he him.
Why do many Americans list pronouns on social media profiles?
This is your State Department.
I'm so glad that we can push this via the State Department.
Read on to learn why it matters what pronouns you use to refer to people and how the United States embraces sharing pronouns.
If you make fun of this, then that's punching down, even though it's coming from the State Department.
By the way, very much looking forward to seeing how the State Department celebrates International Don't Abandon 19 Million Women to the Predations of the Taliban Day.
That'll be really exciting stuff from the State Department, where we share pronouns because we care so much about people who are gender non-conforming, but also are happy to turn over 19 million women to the Taliban.
Solid priorities there over at the State Department.
So it is not punching down.
When you make jokes about the question of whether trans people are in fact members of the sex to which they claim membership, that is not punching down.
By the way, if you want to talk about quote-unquote punching down, Dave Chappelle makes two separate anti-Semitic jokes in the closer.
And no one in the Jewish community seems to care.
Because if you're a left-wing Jew, you don't care because you agree with him.
And if you're a right-wing Jew, or if you're a traditional Jew in any way, you're like, yeah, he made a joke.
Welcome to the real world.
The extent of the walkout wasn't clear, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Many employees are working remotely.
In a list of demands sent to Netflix management, a group of transgender employees called on the company to create a new fund to develop trans and non-binary talent, recruit more trans people into leadership roles, and added a disclaimer before transphobic titles that specifically flag transphobic language, misogyny, homophobia, hate speech, etc.
as required.
The employees wrote these changes and others were necessary to quote avoid future instances of platforming transphobia and hate speech and to account for the harm we have caused and will continue to cause until the below measures are put in place.
So in other words, pay us money and give us better jobs.
And if you give me more money and better job and then you slap like a little warning, then you can put on the Dave Chappelle special to pay my salary is what they're saying, which is pretty cynical.
They're not calling for Netflix never to put up a Dave Chappelle special again.
They're saying that if you put up a Dave Chappelle special, you have to put up a little disclaimer at the front so we can pretend that we did our due diligence.
And then you have to give us a better job.
It's the same thing Disney does, right?
Disney does this stupid routine where if you watch Aladdin, they put up a little warning beforehand saying, this movie traffics in cultural stereotypes.
Now enjoy the film because they're not going to take down Aladdin because everybody loves Aladdin because Aladdin's a great movie.
So instead, they do this dumb routine where it's like, yes, but if you watch this film, you should just remember that we're very sorry we put it up, but not sorry enough to actually take it down because it's important it be up so we can make money off of you.
A Netflix spokeswoman declined to comment on the specific demands.
Now, the best part of this is that the Netflix co-chief executive, Ted Sarandos, originally, he had defended the Chappelle special.
Originally, he was like, yeah, you know, you guys are just gonna have to get over it.
It makes a lot of money for us and we believe that people should have different perspectives and that's fine.
Now, if you believed that from Netflix, You're a sucker, okay?
Because Netflix doesn't actually believe that.
Wake me up the next time Netflix decides to do a comedy special with somebody who's actually right of center.
Like, anytime now.
But in any case, Saranzos now has walked that back a little bit.
He says he screwed up in his communications with staff over the controversy.
He had cited Chappelle's popularity and said the company didn't believe that programming can spur real-world harm.
He said, quote, I should have recognized the fact that a group of our employees was really hurting.
See, this is where he would have been better off just reading my credo, right?
Facts don't care about your feelings would have been a lot better than, I should have recognized that you were hurting.
Okay, first of all, if you think that Sarandos saying, I see why you're hurting would have led to them being like, oh, okay, he understands us.
These people are so crazy.
If you are, this is how you bully a massive billion dollar corporation into doing what you want.
You shout really loud, and then the person's like, well, maybe if I just apologize a little bit, they'll leave me alone.
Maybe if I just give the alligator my little toe, it won't get a taste for me and then want to eat the rest of me.
Yeah, good luck with that, sarandos.
Also in attendance was B Pagels Minor, which sounds sort of like a bad concerto, who doesn't identify as male or female and uses they as a pronoun.
So we know literally nothing about this person other than a very odd Surname.
B Pagelsminer said they were fired by Netflix last week for disclosing sensitive information outside the company that ended up appearing in a Bloomberg media story.
In an interview, B Pagelsminer acknowledged sharing documents internally but denied providing the information to any media outlets.
I categorically deny leaking information, B Pagelsminer said.
Netflix was my family.
I have no desire to hurt them.
So, number one, I do, I always enjoy reading stories where they have to play around with the pronouns.
Notice how the media just falls right into it, right?
The media is already on the side of the protesters because they're doing everything the protesters want.
Instead of just saying he, she, or even they, we're just going to refer to this person by their actual name.
So it sounds like Allen Iverson doing a press conference now.
Right?
Allen Iverson doesn't like practice.
Why would Allen Iverson like to like practice?
Why would Allen Iverson pass the ball?
Allen Iverson isn't doing practice.
It's practice, man!
This is what we've got now from our news stories.
Bee Pagels Minor said that Bee Pagels Minor is the greatest Bee Pagels Minor since Chopin's Nocturne in B Minor.
Netflix said in a statement, quote, While we would normally never talk about an investigation like this, these claims are not supported by the facts.
This employee admitted sharing confidential information externally from their Netflix email on several occasions.
Also, they were the only employee to access the detailed sensitive data on four titles that later appeared in the press.
They claim only to have shared this information in an internal document and said another employee must have leaked it.
However, that document was missing for one title and so cannot have been the source for the leak.
And then the employee wiped their device.
Okay, so that's why the person was fired.
Now, again, why is this a national media story?
The reason it's a national media story is because the media are in league with this.
The media are into this.
Here is some video of the Netflix walkout organizer bashing Dave Chappelle.
Here's what that sounded like.
I want to make it very clear that this isn't an instance of cancel culture, because I've invited Dave Chappelle to have transformative dialogue with us on multiple occasions, and he has made it clear that it is not of interest to him.
So, just to be clear, this isn't cancel culture, but an avoidance of accountability, when we've invited you to be a part of the repair that it takes to be able to not only heal culture, but to move all of us forward.
It's not cancel culture to try and literally get somebody's special removed.
That's not cancel culture anymore.
It's accountability culture.
So, it's the reaction of the media that I really want to point out here.
Protesters are protesters everywhere.
They do stupid things.
It is not a big shock.
The reaction of the media is what's the shock here.
That's like 11 people outside Netflix.
There are more people who are upset with Cuties than are upset with Dave Chappelle's special.
Like way more people.
And that was not a national media story for more than about 30 seconds.
This Chappelle thing has lasted for two weeks.
They're covering the Chappelle controversy longer than they covered the pullout from Afghanistan.
Not a joke.
And everybody's getting involved.
If you're on the left, you have to virtue signal to demonstrate that you're part of the intersectional coalition because the cultural cram-down is in every area of American life.
By the way, if you think this stuff doesn't matter politically or it doesn't move votes, you're wrong.
When people feel inundated by stories like this, their immediate response is to flip the bird to the cultural arbiters and then just do precisely the opposite of what they want.
You want more Trump?
This is how you get more Trump, guys.
We'll talk about this in just one second.
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Okay, so again, the media response is the part that's really astonishing here.
So you have An entire PBS NewsHour brandsing Netflix now a stigma brand.
They say Netflix is a stigma brand.
Really?
So if you subscribe to Netflix, a stigma is now put upon you because seven people are mad at Netflix, plus most of the mainstream media.
There are lots of people who are saying that they don't wish to work with Netflix right now.
I've had producers and showrunners tell me that they are having people be fired and resigned.
And the third thing is that Netflix may become a stigma brand.
That is to say, it may no longer be a place where you're proud to say that you work.
And if that's the case, they will lose employees to their competitors who are dying to know Netflix's secrets.
And if those employers allow those new employees to not only bring their knowledge, but also this desire for more diverse content, over time, Netflix could be in real trouble.
Okay, if you think that Netflix is going to be in real trouble because its 11 trans employees walk across the street to Hulu, Yeah, sure.
If you think there's gonna be a mass walkout by the people in Hollywood from Netflix, which is currently paying them exorbitant sums of cash to make movies when the movie business is in a serious...
Fragmentary period.
You're out of your mind.
But again, the media got to push this because it's not about what happens to Netflix.
It's about what happens to you.
It's what happens to your business because you're not Netflix.
So next time you get hit with a controversy, know that the media are going to put you on the front page.
Understand that all you have to do is have one pissed off employee with a picket sign outside your store saying that you're transphobic and it will be a national news story and you're not Netflix.
You're not a multi-billion dollar company.
And again, the entire left surrounding this thing is really fascinating.
It really is, because think about this.
The AFL-CIO, which is an industrially based union coalition.
That's what the AFL-CIO generally is.
I would imagine the vast majority of members of the AFL-CIO have no dog in the Dave Chappelle versus the trans folks at Netflix fight.
Not only that, I would imagine that the vast majority of members of the AFL-CIO coalition We're not particularly up on using pronouns in their bios.
And yet, the head of the AFL-CIO put out a notice, quote, sending support to Netflix employees, especially those in the trans resource group, walking out today for human rights, dignity, and respect on the job.
Again, remember, none of these people were fired.
They're all being paid by Netflix.
Netflix is paying for their health care.
Netflix is paying all the payroll taxes.
Like, how did Netflix disrespect them?
By literally allowing a thing to be said they didn't like.
According to the AFL-CIO head, it's time for Netflix to listen to its LGBTQ employees and live up to its standards of radical transparency.
What's the transparency?
What's the critique?
I don't even understand the critique.
But the fact that the AFL-CIO is in league with this demonstrates that, again, the entire way that the left operates in the political sphere is that the common man does not matter.
The leadership matters.
You have a bunch of white Liberal elites, college graduates, who are siding with the most radical elements of various groups in order to cobble together a coalition that they think will be politically successful.
If you just feed enough members of the coalition something, then they will all stick by each other and create a certain solidarity.
This all started on campuses, by the way.
Where you would have these bizarre coalitions of like the LGBTQ club and the Muslim club on campus protesting Israel.
And you'd be like, whoa, why is the LGBTQ club protesting Israel along with the Muslim club, which there's not a single Muslim country on planet earth that has any significant level of tolerance toward gay people.
So what's the story?
And the answer is, if you can form a coalition, then the LGBTQ club knows the Muslims are going to show up for whatever they're protesting, right?
That sort of logic now applies.
From campus to broader life.
So you got the AFL-CIO, an industrially based coalition, that is backing trans workers against their employers at Netflix.
Why?
Because again, if you go after employers, then maybe you'll get them to support the AFL-CIO next time you need them to walk out.
The fact that the media are so into this is really, it's really demonstrative of the massive disconnect between the elitists who try to cram culture down on the rest of us and the rest of us.
And it's ongoing and it's consistent, it's continuous.
By the way, we here at Daily Wire enjoy it.
Keep trying to do this because all you are doing is driving more people out into the cornfield and we are out here in the cornfield selling stuff they actually want.
And we're going to be doing more of that.
So if you want to create a market share for us, please continue with this nonsense.
Like, truly, I hope that Netflix caves to the LGBTQ plus radicals.
I hope that they do.
I hope that they tell Dave Chappelle they'll never do a special with him again.
We're out here, man.
If Dave Chappelle wants to do a special with us, we'll do it.
If Ricky Gervais wants to do a special with us, we'll do it here at Daily Wire.
Like, seriously, keep driving talent over to us.
It's really great.
But there's a columnist at the Washington Post.
This demonstrates again where the minds of the media are when it comes to how you should think culturally.
First of all, this rubric that it is actually dangerous to make a joke about the trans cause, which again is anti-biology and anti-reality, is absurd.
Chappelle's latest special, the company's defense of the comedian and its dismissal of concerns that the content was dangerously transphobic.
First of all, this rubric that it is actually dangerous to make a joke about the trans cause, which again is anti-biology and anti-reality, is absurd.
It's absurd.
And there's a piece of psychology today about this.
Quote, there's little evidence that offensive media causes real-world harm.
Correct.
It's just something you claim.
Because if you can claim that something is dangerous, then you can try to shut it down.
Right?
If you normally say, I just don't like what you're saying, so I want you to shut up, then we all understand that you're a censorious fascist.
But if you say, it harms me, it's dangerous for me if you say this, then we're like, oh, well, if it's dangerous, then maybe we should shut it down.
I mean, if speech is violence, then maybe we need to silence the speech.
According to this columnist at Psychology Today, is there evidence to suggest a comedy special such as Chappelle's could increase violence rates?
The good news is, there's not clear evidence linking entertainment media to violence in real life.
Even some professional guilds like the American Psychological Association are sometimes caught on a limb of promoting moral panic with bad signs.
This sort of stuff happens all the time.
Again, because it's politically driven, not scientifically driven.
But this is the Washington Post columnist Helena Andrews-Dyer saying, quote, A crowd of dozens gathered outside the streamer's West Hollywood offices to denounce both Chappelle and the company's chief executive, Ted Sarandos.
Dozens!
You hear dozens.
I mean, Honestly, like, dozens?
A crowd of... the assembled dozens were maddened.
They're baying for the blood of Ted Sarandos.
The assembled dozens.
Very intimidating stuff right there.
Some supporters of Chappelle attended the rally, clashing with protesters as they urged Netflix not to limit speech and held up signs with messages such as, jokes are funny.
We're here today not because we can't take a joke, said Ashley Marie Preston, media personality and the Walkouts organizer.
We're here today because the jokes are taking lives.
The jokes...
How?
How?
You just walk in on the street, and suddenly a joke pounces from a shadowed doorway and stabs you directly in the eye with the punchline.
And down you go, bleeding from your eye socket.
And as you fade into unconsciousness, you think to yourself, man, should've gotten policy genius.
Like, what?
I don't understand.
How does the joke... The jokes are taking lives.
The jokes are taking lives, you idiots.
The issue exploded after the October 5th release of the Comedian Special, in which he compares being trans to wearing blackface, makes jokes about transgender people's genitalia, and declares he's team TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, because he believes that gender is a fact.
He compares the struggles of the black community directly with the LGBTQ community.
He said, I can't help but feel like if slaves had baby oil and booty shorts, we might have been free 100 years sooner.
In their list of demands to Sarandos, the Netflix employee resource group Trans, little star, which consists of trans and non-binary employees, wrote in a news release, they want the company to add disclaimers, make investment in trans creators, recruit trans people to work in Netflix leadership roles.
But again, the fact that this has driven such media attention demonstrates that it is not about where people think the culture actually is, it's what they think the culture should be, and you should shut up, and you should take it.
And this is the nature of how culture changes.
The media now represent a hardcore minority of radicals who are going to change the culture whether you like it or not.
And they're going to excise you from the culture whether you like it or not.
We have some more examples of this in just a moment because it is, again, it seems bizarre up until the point when it actually comes for you and your kids in school and your business.
We'll get to more of it in a second.
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Okay, so, it is not just with regard to Netflix that the cultural arbiters are determining what the rest of us are supposed to think.
And if you question it, then you are labeled intolerant.
If you question it, then you are labeled outside the bounds of moral discourse.
I mean, corporations will spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars in order to convince you that something is popular that it's not popular.
Right now they're trying to convince you that the trans movement, the trans rights movement, is extraordinarily popular in the United States.
It is not.
They're trying to convince you that the movement to drug your kids at the age of 15 with hormones and then prepare them for surgery is popular in America.
It is not.
They're trying to convince you that people making jokes is unacceptable.
Most Americans don't believe that.
And the stubbornness with which these narratives are pursued is truly telling.
My favorite example is the WNBA.
So the WNBA is not a thing.
I'm sorry, it's never going to be a thing.
You can't make fetch happen.
It's just never going to be a thing.
And the WNBA, I'm not saying that women shouldn't play basketball.
Women can play basketball.
But if you're going to pretend there's a massive market for women playing basketball and people watching them, you're out of your mind.
And the reason you're out of your mind is because a good high school boys basketball team could beat a WNBA team.
I couldn't.
I suck at basketball.
But, a good high school boys basketball team could beat a WNBA team.
And literally, it is a story in the WNBA when somebody dunks.
It is not even a story when a high school player dunks.
In the boys' side.
Now, again, women can play basketball.
They're more skilled than I. All of that is fine and dandy.
But there is this mainline effort in the media to promote the notion that the WNBA is a thing, when it is clearly not a thing.
ESPN tries to cover the WNBA as though it is equivalent in interest level to any other major sport.
When the WNBA's fan, singular, is just that, a fan, The grand total number of people who care about the WNBA are the executives at the NBA who want to pretend that they care about gender parity while paying WNBA players $40,000 a year and NBA players $40 million a year.
And the immediate families of the people in the WNBA and some very driven feminists who are apparently willing to sacrifice an evening of time to watch somebody play the four corners offense, essentially.
Okay, so this was made humiliatingly clear yesterday.
So, the Chicago Sky, apparently they're a team in a league that exists.
Yeah, didn't really know or care, really, because who does?
So they had a championship celebration.
So the championship celebration started off at the park.
Is it Millennium Park?
I guess.
In Chicago.
And some people showed up, no crowd estimates.
And then they had a parade.
And people are like, well, you know, just because nobody showed up for the parade doesn't mean people didn't show up at the park.
Yes, but normally when you have like the Golden State Warriors win an NBA championship, people show up for the parade too.
The video of the parade is deeply humiliating to the WNBA as well it should be.
And remember, the NBA subsidizes the WNBA to the tune of like tens of millions of dollars every year.
If you can't see this, there are buses of people going down the street, open air buses.
There are four buses.
First of all, I don't know how big this team is.
There are four buses.
No one on the street.
No one.
I mean, like, the assembled score of people cheered ecstatically as the buses passed.
The assembled small group of people who could fit in a telephone booth cheered wildly.
Ah, the excitement.
Can you feel the excitement at the WNBA here?
Can you feel it?
Wow, palpable, palpable excitement.
And people haven't been this excited since the release of Ishtar.
The bicyclists and the people, honest to God, the people on the top of the bus, wildly outnumbered the number of people who are supposedly cheering them.
It's really, like, it's an amazing sight, because they've spent tens of millions of dollars over the years to try and make the WNBA happen, and it's not happening.
Again, that is not a rip on the players, because the players have a certain level of talent and a thing that is not marketable.
I mean, sorry.
And yet, there's an attempt by the culture to continue to force it down, and it just won't end.
And watch, because I'm saying this, people get very angry at me.
Because I'm merely pointing out that there is no crowd for the WNBA, and no one cares about the WNBA.
They'll be like, ah, you're a sexist, that's why you're even pointing this out.
No, I'm just pointing out that there are cultural arbiters who try to tell you that things are popular that are not popular, and that things are unpopular when they are popular.
Right?
Netflix is in real trouble because 12 people walked out of the Netflix headquarters.
Netflix is in serious trouble, and you should know that next time you think about telling a joke about transness.
But also, the WNBA is wildly popular.
So popular, and man, people are gonna be so pissed at you if you make fun of the fact that no one showed up for the- By the way, it's been a long-running joke that no one watches WNBA games.
I mean, Norm Macdonald was making jokes about this like 20 years ago.
Family Guy has an episode.
Or they show a WNBA game, and then it cuts to the fan.
That's one guy in an empty stadium.
And I'm sorry, that's right, and it's hilarious.
The thing about leftist views of culture is that they run up against reality, but it is also true that sometimes, not always, but sometimes, if you just keep pushing, and you push hard enough, and you just keep pushing, eventually, you shift the entire culture in your direction, which is why you get the stubbornness.
Normally, if you're the NBA, and you run up against the hard reality, and then nobody wants to watch the WNBA, you just shut it down.
You're like, okay, we could use that money better elsewhere.
But instead, you insist on promoting it.
Because maybe, just maybe, you will change the landscape.
Alright, keep trying it.
Keep trying it.
And again, the cram-down formula, it's a very small group of people who are trying to define the cultural taste.
It's not working in the case of the WNBA because, I mean, there's just no way.
I'm sorry.
Like, there are certain things that rational human beings just won't do.
Rational human beings don't run into traffic.
Rational human beings don't jump off of hundred-story buildings.
And rational people don't watch WNBA games, unless forced to do so.
But the thing is that this sort of cultural control does have real world consequences on a smaller scale and with regard to particular issues.
So, for example, on college campuses, this continues to be a major problem.
It is this view, by the way, of things like the WNBA that leads to the Title IX stupidity, wherein sports is supposed to be equivalent in colleges between men and women.
That's very silly.
Women's softball is not the same as men's baseball, for example.
But in any case, a good example of sort of how the cultural arbiters decide things comes courtesy of MIT, according to the New York Times.
Michael Powell reporting, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited the geophysicist Dorian Abbott to give a prestigious public lecture this autumn. He seemed a natural choice, a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life. Then a swell of angry resistance arose. Some faculty members and grad students argued that Dr. Abbott, a professor at the University of Chicago, had created harm, harm by speaking out against aspects of affirmative action and diversity programs. Right, so people are making the same claim about
this geophysicist, Dorian Abbott, that they're making about Dave Chappelle.
He's creating harm.
What was the harm?
In videos and opinion pieces, Dr. Abbott has asserted that such programs treat, quote, people as members of a group rather than individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.
He said he favored a diverse pool of applicants selected on merit.
So that Inarguable fact, which is that when you use affirmative action, you are treating people based on group characteristic rather than individual merit, which is inarguable.
It is literally the purpose of affirmative action.
The purpose of affirmative action is that black people historically were discriminated against.
Therefore, we must affirmatively discriminate in favor of black people and applications in order to rectify the breach.
He points this out and says that this cuts directly against the notion of individual merit and judges people on the basis of group, which has a very ugly history in the 20th century.
And this caused the lecture to be withdrawn.
He said that his planned lecture at MIT would have made no mention of his views on affirmative action, but his opponents in the sciences argued he represented a, quote, infuriating, inappropriate, and oppressive choice.
On September 30th, MIT reversed course.
The head of its Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department called off Dr. Abbott's lecture to be delivered to professors, grad students, and the public, including some top black and Latino high school students.
Robert Vanderhilst, the head of the department at MIT, said, quote, besides freedom of speech, we have the freedom to pick the speaker who best fits our needs.
Words matter and have consequences.
Ever more fraught arguments over speech and academic freedom on American campuses have moved as a flood tide into the sciences.
Biology, physics, math, all have seen fierce debates over courses, hiring and objectivity, and some on the academic left have moved to silence those who disagree on certain questions.
A few fields have purged scientific terms and names, seen by some as offensive.
There is a rising call for citational justice, arguing that professors and grad students should seek to cite more Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American scholars, and in some cases, refuse to acknowledge in footnotes the research of those who hold distasteful views.
That's unbelievable.
So you actually have major universities now deciding whether or not you're allowed to cite a scientifically useful or innovative paper based on the race of the person who wrote the... I mean, this is Soviet science.
This is Lysenkoism.
The only type of science that is approved is the science approved by the state.
Frankly, it sounds like the Nazi treatment of quote-unquote Jewish science, right?
If it comes from the Jews, it can't be good science.
So if it comes from this white guy, it can't be a good innovative piece of scientific literature?
That's insane.
I'm not saying it's a prelude to the Holocaust.
I'm saying that that is a piece of anti-science, propagandistic trash, and it is undeserving of any level of respect.
They're literally saying that they want to refuse to acknowledge in footnotes the research of people who hold distasteful views.
Normally, when you refuse to acknowledge in a footnote where you're getting a piece, that's called plagiarism.
Joe Biden is quite familiar with it.
But apparently, they now want you to not cite people if those people hold outside views that you don't like.
I hate to break it to these people, but literally every scientist, up until the last five minutes, disagreed with them on politics.
I promise you, there are things I'm sure that Einstein said that you would disagree with, so I guess you can never cite Einstein again.
The decision by MIT, viewed as a high citadel of science in the United States, took aback some prominent scientists.
Debate and argumentation, impassioned, even ferocious, is the mother's milk of science, they said.
Jerry Coyne, emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, said, I thought scientists would not get on board with the denial of free speech movement.
I was absolutely wrong.
100%.
Dr. Abbott spoke of his shock when told his speech was canceled.
Quote, I didn't know what to say.
We're not going to do the best science that we can if we are constrained ideologically.
No sooner had MIT cancelled his speech than Robert George, director of Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, invited him to give the speech there on Thursday, the same day as the cancelled lecture.
Dr. George says MIT has behaved disgracefully in capitulating to a politically motivated campaign that is part of a larger trend of the politicization of science.
And then the story took another turn this week because David Romps, a professor of climate physics at the University of California, Berkeley, announced he would be resigning as director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.
He said he had tried to persuade his fellow scientists and professors to invite Abbott.
In my view, he said, there are some institutional principles we have to hold sacred.
Okay, but apparently they did not want him to.
They agreed that this scientist should not be able to speak.
The controversy surrounding Dr. Abbott's cancelled talk speaks as well to a tension manifest in progressive circles between social justice and free speech.
Some faculty members have come to see identity and racial inequities as more urgent than questions of muzzled speech.
Phoebe Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College, one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at MIT's original decision to invite Dr. Abbott to speak.
Cohen agreed Dr. Abbott's views reflect a broad current in American society.
Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action.
Nor was she enamored of MIT's offer to let him speak at a later date to the MIT professors.
To me, the professional consequences are extremely minimal, she said.
What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate?
Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?
Here is her answer, and this is everything.
Quote, this idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.
That is insane.
I'm sorry that's insane.
It's also racist.
If the idea of intellectual debate and rigor is restricted to white people, or is a white people invention, that is the most ra- You know who agrees with that?
David Duke.
That is the most racist thing I have read today, for sure.
That is insane.
Intellectual rigor and debate, as a pinnacle of intellectualism, if it had been up to, apparently, the people of color around the world, these things would be of very low priority.
You mean science?
And people debating ideas, wow, what a statement.
But again, these are the people who hold power in a wide variety of institutions.
And eventually, that will have an impact on how we live.
Not just at the universities, not just with regards to companies like Netflix, but the kind of content you can consume.
The kind of things you're allowed to say out loud.
You wonder why people are living in political fear right now?
That's why people are living in political fear right now.
We all know it.
And this stuff has real world consequences.
It's going to have political consequences as well.
The left is constantly saying things like, why do you even care about this?
There's this gaslighting effect.
Why do you care about this?
Why are you paying attention to the cultural cram downs?
After all, you don't have to pay attention until you make me pay attention.
You will be made, as my friend Eric Erickson suggested, you will be made to care.
Hands off is not a policy that redounds to your own benefit at this point.
Okay, in just a second, we'll get to the Biden administration announcing the long-awaited ability to get a vaccine if you are five years old.
When I say long-awaited, I mean not all that many people were deeply concerned about it if they had checked any of the stats, but we'll get to that in just one moment.
First, let's talk about another podcast you should give a listen to, the Jordan Harbinger Show.
It's a podcast you should try.
I know every day somebody tells you you have to listen to some podcast or other and most of you just kind of nod and then you forget about it, but you should check out Jordan's show.
Apple named it one of its best of 2018.
It is aimed at making you a better informed, more critical thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works and come to your own conclusions about what's happening even inside your own brain.
Each episode is a conversation with a different fascinating guest.
When I say there's something for everyone here, I really mean it.
In one episode, Jordan talks to a hostage negotiator from the FBI who offers techniques on how to get people to like and trust you, which sounds useful and somewhat disturbing.
At the same time, you should check out Jordan's conversations with people like Scott Adams, maybe Jack Schafer.
Even though I don't always agree with Jordan, his interviews are always fascinating.
I always learn something.
We here at Dailyware enjoy the show.
You will too.
There's a lot here.
Check out jordanharbinger.com slash start for some episode recommendations or search for The Jordan Harbinger Show.
That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R.
All righty, we're gonna get into the Biden administration now pushing COVID shots on kids, which is the next step.
and see which episodes appeal to you.
All righty, we're gonna get into the Biden administration now pushing COVID shots on kids, which is the next step.
First, you deserve nothing less than the facts We are here to supply them on our newest podcast, Morning Wire.
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All righty, meanwhile, the Biden administration is preparing for COVID shots for five to 11 The White House COVID coordinator Jeff Zients, he says we now have enough shots for all of the kiddies.
Here he was yesterday.
We have secured vaccine supply to vaccinate every child ages 5 through 11.
And as soon as the vaccine is authorized by the FDA, we will begin shipping millions of doses nationwide.
States, tribes, and territories are working to ensure that doses continue to be distributed efficiently and equitably across their jurisdictions.
And importantly, we worked with Pfizer to modify the packaging of the pediatric doses to make it easier for pediatricians, family doctors, and other providers to provide vaccines to children.
OK, so I have a question.
Were you concerned about your 5 to 11 year old?
Because if so, I'm wondering exactly how concerned you are.
It's one thing to say, you know, on the off chance that maybe my kid is going to really suffer from COVID, I'll get the vaccine.
I've looked at the stats and I think that maybe the vaccine is going to be safer for my kid than the alternative of actually getting COVID.
But if either of these things is like deeply worrying you on a serious level, You should just understand that according to Martin McCary of Johns Hopkins, 10 to 20 kids total across the entire pandemic have died.
I'm talking not between 5 and 11, I'm talking between 0 and 18 have died without serious pre-existing conditions in the United States over the entire course of the pandemic.
Out of 700,000 people.
10 to 20.
Okay, so, you're saying to yourself, should I get the vaccine for my kid?
I don't know the answer to that.
I get my kids the flu shot because flu is more dangerous to my kids than COVID is.
I'm concerned about giving my seven and five-year-old the COVID shot because, frankly, there's no longitudinal data.
The entire sample size for Pfizer's study was 2,300 kids.
We know that myocarditis was appearing for the second shot for teenagers about one in 9,000 occasions.
So a sample size of 2,300 isn't even large enough to detect.
How often myocarditis is going to crop up in kids.
Also, we don't really know how often myocarditis is happening in kids from COVID itself.
So, you really have no comparative stats at this point and no longitudinal data.
So, there are serious questions to be asked about getting the COVID vaccine.
Again, your kid getting COVID should not be at the top of your risk chart for your kids.
Kids get sick all the time.
Kids put themselves in danger all the time.
On the list of things that can kill your kid, COVID is very, very low ranking.
Like, extremely low ranking.
So, what you might have said to yourself is, okay, well, I understand all of that.
And I'm kind of indifferent as to whether my kid gets a COVID vaccine, but you know, I'm okay with getting a COVID vaccine.
I'm not like super anti it.
Fair enough.
That's fine.
The real reason I wanna get my kid vaccinated is because then my kids will be able to go to school without masks.
Because then we'll be done, right?
I mean, they'll be vaccinated, all the kids will be vaccinated, we'll have slowed the spread, my kid will be immune, and everything will be hunky-dory.
Wrong!
Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the CDC announced yesterday that even after your kids are vaccinated, your five-year-olds, who should not be masked in schools anyway, okay, let's face it, there is no data, none, that masking five-year-olds has been effective in lowering the hospitalization and death rate There is zero evidence that kids need to be masked in schools.
There are many countries that do not mask small children in schools, including Great Britain and all of the Nordic countries.
This belief, this religious belief that slapping a cloth mask on a five-year-old somehow is going to protect them from the disease is unsupportable by any of the available data right now.
It's just not supportable.
Delta has a very high viral load.
Kids do not know how to wear masks.
Kids are constantly picking at their masks.
Even medical professionals don't wear PPE properly.
You think that your five-year-old's wearing your PPE properly?
If you've ever seen the inside of your kid's mask at the end of the day, it is all snot and boogers and it's just... Yeah, sure.
I'm sure it's working great.
Okay, so right now, before the vaccines, there's no reason that you should be masking five-year-olds.
And yes, it does damage to five-year-olds psychologically when they see nothing but masks all day.
It is irritating to kids.
It annoys them.
They get headaches.
It hurts their ears.
Seeing faces is very critical for, I mean, it's amazing how we just threw out the actual science on this.
The neuroscience on this is absolutely clear.
Seeing faces for children is really, really important.
There are all sorts of orphanage studies from places like Romania and China demonstrating that when kids in developmental stages do not see faces, it actually damages them.
But we've pretended for a year and a half like that's not the case, because the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics has decided to just mirror whatever the leftist priority of the day is.
Here's Rochelle Walensky announcing that even if you get your kid the jab, your kid still can't take off the mask.
Which, I'm sorry, this is crazy.
This is a recipe for masking for the rest of time.
There is no falsifiability to this.
And there are people all over the United States on health boards for schools who have taken the position that literally there is no metric by which the masks will ever be removed.
They cannot tell you at what point the risk is low enough for the mask to be removed from your kid.
Here's Rochelle Walensky doing this routine yesterday.
We will be working to scale up pediatric vaccination.
That's it will take some time.
And as I just noted, as we head into these winter months, we know we cannot be complacent.
We also know that previous data that schools that have had masks in place were three and a half times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school closure.
So right now we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools.
There's no end to this road.
I know there are a lot of people out there, even on the central right, who are saying, well, you know, if I get my kid jabbed, then maybe they'll leave us alone.
They're never going to leave you alone.
The not leaving you alone is the point.
Some of them are saying this openly.
Jacob Stern, who's a columnist for The Atlantic, is now saying, you know what happened last year?
It's really fascinating.
There were basically no flu cases in the United States last year.
Now, that's because there wasn't a virulent flu strain that was on the rise.
Also, there's been some suspicion that the testing for COVID was also catching up flu in the test.
Okay, but let's assume that it was really just the masking, right?
Let's assume that the masking cut down on COVID, but it also cut down on the flu because the flu is not quite as transmissible as COVID.
Now they're saying, Jacob Stern is saying, maybe we should just mask forever.
Kids get the flu, flu's deadly.
Maybe we should just continue masking people forever.
They don't want to get back to normal.
That's the entire point.
The control is the point.
When they talk about vaccinating kids, I have no trust, by the way, they're not going to try and make this mandatory.
I got in a bit of a tiff yesterday with Yair Rosenberg online because he was angry at me for pointing out that very few kids had died from COVID.
And thus, the notion that you should be panicked about making sure your kid gets a shot in the same way that you were about your 75-year-old father, mother, or grandparent getting the shot was very silly.
Like, I wanted to make sure that my grandparents got the shot, my grandmothers got the shot, like ASAP.
I wanted to make sure that my parents got the shot ASAP.
Didn't care about my kids getting the shot because I can actually read a risk chart.
But he was saying, well, yeah, but you know, you shouldn't discourage people from getting the vaccine.
I'm not.
It's your choice.
But I don't think that it's going to remain your choice very long.
LAUSD has already said all kids above the age of 12 need to get vaccinated.
You think they're going to restrict it to that?
You think they're going to stop there?
They're immediately going to move to five-year-olds.
They're going to be saying that your five-year-old must get vaccinated or cannot go to school.
That is the direction.
It is all about the control.
Why?
And now there are new excuses.
Well, you know, your five-year-old could infect grandma.
Yeah, well, guess what?
My five-year-old's sick all the time because he's five.
And if grandma's really that immunocompromised, then she should be socially distancing from my kids regardless because kids are little disease bags.
That is what they are.
They carry around stuff all the time.
They're constantly sick and wiping their nose because they're developing immunity.
That's what you do as a child.
It is patently crazy the way that this administration is approaching these issues.
And to pretend that now that the kids are vaccinated, they're going to let you go back to normal?
No, they won't.
They will not.
They're fully invested in the idea that they've set themselves a bar they can never surpass.
The bar is zero COVID.
It's never going to happen.
And so long as it's never going to happen, they'll continue maintaining this stuff.
Because the great danger to them Is that it is proved once and for all that government cannot fix all of your problems, not even the biggest problems like disease.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
It's the Matt Wall Show.
It airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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